But the biggest problem in California is that the government has refused to build the reservoirs and dams necessary to actually save water when the rain does come. As the Wall Street Journal points out, Israel has weathered droughts for years. So has Arizona. Both built infrastructure. California has not, largely because politicians like Jerry Brown stopped such construction decades ago. The Wall Street Journal points out:

Money is not the obstacle. Since 2000 voters have approved five bonds authorizing $22 billion in spending for water improvements… desalination projects have been abandoned…

Because no sooner is an infrastructure project proposed than the Sierra Club and a hundred other Environmentalist Denominations file lawsuits demanding it be stopped. Environmentalists have actually put a measure on the ballot to dismantle existing water reservoirs. Environmentalism is a fundamentalist, extremist religion that says nothing should ever be built anywhere if it could potentially annoy wildlife. It’s not “NIMBY,” it’s “BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody.”

It also doesn’t help California’s problems that they flush 2.6 million acre-feet of usable water into the ocean because environmentalists are worried about their sacred fish.

So, at one end of the spectrum, progressives are encouraging adults (and especially women) to behave like prepubescent children. At the other end of the scale, prepubescent children are being both hypersexualized, and treated like they should be allowed to make all kinds of decisions with serious, unalterable consequences for themselves.

South Bay Congressman Mike Honda, 73, is no different any other grandparent who brags about their “truly special” grandchild. But the Democratic House member has put himself in the national spotlight by tweeting and talking about his granddaughter Malisa, who is 8 years old — and transgender.

In an opinion piece last week in the Bay Area Reporter, the gay and lesbian newspaper, Honda described in detail the story of his grandchild, whom he said was “assigned male at birth,” but who at 18 months “announced to my daughter’s family: ‘I’m a girl.’”

18 months is also the usual age at which Democrats fix their ideas on economic, social, and foreign policy.

A report by the Census Bureau released Thursday shows that over 48 million Americans, around 16%, now live below the poverty line, but the number’s even worse for California, which when cost of living is factored in has a stunning 23.4% in poverty.

But on the plus side, gay marriage is legal, gay history is taught in public schools, and there are transgendered bathrooms for everyone!

A newly amended bill from a California lawmaker would require college students to stop in the heat of passion and establish verbal or written consent before having sex anywhere on campus, reportsL.A. Weekly.

SB 967, amended last week by state Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles), would mandate that college students obtain “an affirmative, unambiguous, and conscious decision by each participant to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity.”

Update: I thought that name was familiar. Kevin de Leon is the same genius progressive hairpiece that a few months ago warned about dangerous assault weapons that fire “30 magazine clips in half a second.” And they should be outlawed, of course.

The state Senate on Thursday approved a measure that would gradually raise the minimum wage in California from the current $8 an hour to $13 in 2017, despite warnings from the California Chamber of Commerce that the bill is a “job killer.”

Warning: Gay Left politicians at work!

Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) said his bill is necessary to help lift many of the 7.9 million Californians being paid minimum wage out of poverty. “Income inequality has been spoken of by our president as the defining challenge of our time,” Leno told his colleagues.

He said the current minimum wage is so low it allows many who receive it to get public assistance. “It is our tax dollars that are subsidizing the largest corporations paying these poverty wages.” Leno said. No other state has a minimum wage of $13 an hour…

The “Related” was added by the LA Times (when I pasted the text). Fitting, isn’t it? Because the measure would actually keep poor Californians in poverty, increase inequality, and push more people onto public assistance. Is that Leno’s real goal?

It’s all for futility anyway; neither of guys could win. California is a de facto one-party state where no Republican, or even moderate Democrat, can win statewide office. Californians decided at some point that they wanted the worst business environment in the country, terrible public schools, massive waves of illegal immigrants, and job-crushing environmental regulations. And they have, accordingly, elected a one-party Government to deliver those things. Instead, come the fall, Californians will re-elected a governor whose sole abiding obsession is that LAX might be underwater in 200 years, rather than fostering prosperity in the here and now. (BTW, that “LAX will be underwater” Myth Status: Busted).

Also, Sandra Fluke is running for the California State Senate against Rush Limbaugh; who isn’t running and doesn’t even live in California. As a single woman of privilege in her mid-thirties who has never held a job and wants the Government to force other people to pay for her birth control; Ms. Fluke is the paradigm of the modern Democrat voter. She’ll probably be governor one day.

Although this story focuses on California’s abuses, it shows how government gets its revenue in general: arbitrarily and with the power and willingness to ruin people’s lives.

In 1970, a young Southern California electrical engineer and inventor named Gilbert Hyatt filed a patent application for an innovative microprocessor chip…

Twenty years later…the U.S. patent office awarded Hyatt the patent…a multimillion-dollar windfall. He moved to Las Vegas, where he said he was a full-time resident before he received the earnings.

California’s Franchise Tax Board (FTB)…decided to seek $7.4 million in back taxes, claiming that he was still a resident of California when the money came in. That sounds like a simple enough dispute that could quickly be resolved, but what followed has been an ordeal that has consumed a good bit of Hyatt’s adult life.

…[for] a sum that now tops $55 million as interest and penalties have accrued…The tax authorities have been pursuing him through its administrative process. Tired of the endless investigations, Hyatt filed suit in Nevada court in 1998. California officials said they weren’t subject to an out-of-state tort lawsuit. California lost that argument in the Nevada Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court and the high court decision sent the case back to a Nevada district court, which awarded Hyatt nearly $400 million in damages after finding that the California authorities abused their power and invaded his privacy. That case is on appeal.

Hyatt believes that California officials are purposefully delaying. “Specifically, because of the 20 year delay Hyatt can no longer obtain a fair and full adjudication of whether he owes state taxes to California,” according to his lawsuit. “During this time, material witnesses have passed away, memories of witnesses have faded, and documents relevant and important to Hyatt are no longer available.” The board keeps assessing penalties…He suspects the tax board is waiting for him to die so that it can go after his estate.

Under California law, the Franchise Tax Board has the “presumption of correctness,” meaning that the onus always is on Hyatt to disprove what the tax officials say. And, he argues, they keep changing their stories and their allegations, thus resulting in more years of legal expenses and disputes…

To sum up – When dealing with the tax man in America today, you have:

No “innocent until proven guilty”.

No real “right to a speedy trial”.

Kafka-esque complexity and situations rigged for you to lose.

To anyone who wants to claim that our tax system is “voluntary”, or that government somehow isn’t a gun, or that taxation somehow isn’t a use of force on people (many conscientious tax-objectors are given long jail sentences): You’re just lying.

The attorney for San Diego Mayor Bob Filner said in a letter the city may be liable for damages in a sexual harassment lawsuit because Filner never received mandated training about such behavior.

“The city has a legal obligation to provide sexual harassment training to all management level employees,” wrote attorney Harvey Berger in a letter requesting the city pay Filner’s legal bills in defense of the lawsuit filed by his former communications director.

Hourly earnings in the year ended in June advanced by the most since July 2011…Stocks climbed…

“Job growth is starting to hum along,” said Jonathan Basile, director of U.S. economics at Credit Suisse Holdings USA…”All of it is laying the groundwork for more spending and more jobs. This virtuous cycle is really taking hold…”

Sounds wonderful, right? Now for the reality check. From the same article:

Retailers, professional and business services, health care, and leisure and hospitality businesses led the gains… Factories reduced payrolls by 6,000…

Translation: We added bartenders, servers and beauticians; we actually lost industrial jobs.

Also recall that when Bush 43′s economic recovery created similar jobs at similar rates, the media/Democrat complex denounced it bitterly as “McJobs” and a “jobless recovery.” So, why describe it now as “roaring…humming…a virtuous cycle”?

But, to continue from the same article:

The number of part-time workers rose for the fourth month…

The underemployment rate — which includes part-time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want to work but have given up looking — rose to a four-month high of 14.3 percent in June from 13.8 percent the month before… “A lot of those people who have management experience are not finding jobs…”

In other words: After full-time jobs were lost in the recession, part-time jobs were created in the recovery. Some of that always happens, but Obama has taken it to a new level. Finally, consider this, from BloombergBusinessweek:

Why Are California’s Businesses Disappearing?

There were 1.3 million businesses in California at the end of 2012, 5.2 percent fewer than in the previous year (that’s about 73,000 fewer). To put that in perspective, Massachusetts lost 5,200 businesses, the second-highest amount…

There is no nationwide recovery, if California is still losing businesses at “recession” rates.

California Democrats now control every statewide elective office and have veto proof majorities in both chambers of the state legislators. They passed a $6 billion tax hike last November and the state’s carbon cap and trade and renewable electricity mandates are now being implemented. No state that has embraced the progressive policy vision more than California.

There is just one problem: California now leads the nation in unemployment.

I began my holiday shopping yesterday in Westwood Village, the shopping/dining district immediately adjacent to UCLA; was struck by the amount of vacant retail space. On Westwood Blvd itself, I counted five empty storefronts on each side of the street just on one block (between Kinross and Weyburn). And that’s not counting the signs on the second floor.

And I could see signs advertising “Space available” on other buildings beyond this block.

When I mentioned this in one store where I bought some gifts, a clerk commented that someone had just said the same thing about Beverly Hills. He noted that Westwood Blvd had been particularly hard hit, with a Mexican restaurant that had served the area for twenty-five years, recently vacating its Westwood premises.

I believe this the space that restaurant once occupied:

Note these two storefronts, immediately adjacent to one another: (more…)

Today, however, it seems only to cling to ideas long since proved worthless. Businesses are fleeing the state. Storefronts on once bustling commercial thoroughfares sit vacant for want of retail tenants. The unemployment rate remains above 10%.

Revenue means taxes, and certainly those who have been blessed the most, who have disproportionately extracted, by whatever skill, more and more from the national wealth, they’re going to have to share more of that. . . . And everyone is going to have to realize that building roads is important, investing in schools is important, paying for the national defense is important, biomedical research is important, the space program is an indicator of the world leader – all that takes money.

Ah, but Jerry, before that referendum passed, we were already taxed enough to pay for such things. And other states manage to pay for roads, schools and etc., with much lower tax rates than we had before Prop 30 passed. The issue is not the absence of revenue, but the excess of bureaucracy and the superabundance of benefits for government employees.

But, his suggestion about the state’s (supposed) revenue shortfall is only part of what is troubling in the once and current governor’s statement. By using the verb, “extract,” to explain how wealthy citizens acquired their wealth, he all but dismisses their accomplishment, sounding scornful toward their achievement.

He seems to be suggesting that the “wealthy” extracted income from a fixed pool of national wealth, as if said pool existed in some remote locale — and they were the most conniving in accessing it and “extracting” the wealth already there. They didn’t access the wealth, they created it, generally through their hard work and ingenuity. (more…)

Obama led by 14 in September, but now trails by 9 in October, a 23-point right turn among the most coveted voters. One explanation, based on the poll data: The number of Romney supporters who said they were voting “for Mitt Romney” as opposed to “against Barack Obama” is way up, month over month.

Like independents across the country, those in the Golden State are now swinging toward Mitt. Even if this trend continues, it’s unlikely to put the state in play, but is a sign that even where the Romney campaign is not active, these voters are turning away from Barack Obama and toward Mitt Romney.

Indeed, one state considered firm in the Obama campaign, but known for its independent streak (having elected two independents governor in the past forty years), is not looking as good for the Democrat as he might hope. (more…)

And do note what I circled above. In the article, Clifford Kruass reports:

California typically has substantially higher gasoline prices than most of the country because of its tough environmental regulations and high taxes. Gasoline supplies are traditionally tight this time of year as refiners do maintenance work to switch from summer to fall gasoline blends mandated by the California pollution-reduction regulations. But this year, energy experts say, the local gasoline market is particularly chaotic because of the refinery shutdowns.

Via Instapundit. Do wonder if this crisis will cause California voters to truly appreciate the cost of state regulations and the burden of increased taxation.

In pastposts, I have cited the scores of empty storefronts I see on the once-bustling commercial thoroughfares of Los Angeles. Today, driving along Wilshire from Crescent Heights to Doheny, part of the drive in Beverly Hills, I was struck at the increasing amount of signs I saw advertising office and retail space “for lease” or “available”.

Are people in this town even aware how federal, state and local taxes and regulations make it difficult for entrepreneurs to stay in business? Or are they just more concerned about social issues?
——
*Nor are Jerry Brown’s

For anecdotal evidence of California’s electoral uncompetitiveness, check out what passes for political advocacy in my Silicon Valley neighborhood. Never mind the 10.7 percent local unemployment rate or the perennially yawning federal budget deficit: The President’s dog wants Obama reelected and, presumably, you should too.

Interestingly, in driving around LA today, I only saw one Obama sticker on a car–the very one in the post linked above.